"Moralizing" may be the nearest thing to a dirty word
in current public discourse, and nowhere is this more true than in discussions
of the content of schooling. Undergraduate students at one of the most
selective schools of education were recently asked the following questions:

Suppose you are asked to teach a 7th grade course or unit in moral education.
Question 1: If you had to choose between one of the two models below,
which would you choose? Question 2: Would you agree to teach the
course if B were the only option given?

A. The first approach encourages students to develop their own values
and value systems. This approach relies on presenting the students with
provocative ethical dilemmas and encouraging open discussion and exchange
of opinion. The ground rule for discussion is that there are no right or
wrong answers. Each student must decide for himself/herself what is right
or wrong. Students are encouraged to be nonjudgmental about values that
differ from their own.

B. The second approach involves a conscious effort to teach specific
virtues and character traits such as courage, justice, self-control, honesty,
responsibility, practicing charity, obeying lawful authority, etc. These
concepts are introduced and explained and then illustrated by memorable
examples from history, literature, and current events. The teacher expresses
a strong belief in the importance of these virtues and encourages his/her
students to practice them in their own lives.

It will not come as a surprise to any reader with recent experience
in American schools that 88 percent of these future teachers selected the
first approach, and only 9 percent, the second. Nearly half of the ninety-four
students participating said that they would refuse to use the method
that involved teaching virtues and positive character traits.

How have we come to this pass? Is it simply that our society has become
pervasively uncomfortable with any suggestion that one choice might be
better than another, with, that is, any hint of moral judgment? Certainly
this is part of it. There is something more, however, a dimension of the
evolution of American public education itself that favors the promotion
of tolerance above all else.

In discussions of the values content of instruction, it is a common
experience to be told that our society "simply won't survive unless
we promote tolerance." And since no one wants to be accused of "intolerance,"
such assertions are rarely challenged. But what does "tolerance"
mean? It comes from the Latin word meaning "to bear a burden";
the tolerance of a bridge is the amount of weight that bridge can bear
before it breaks. When we tolerate someone's beliefs or actions, we are
putting up with something with which we do not agree, or that we even find
offensive or repugnant. Riding on the subway, for example, we may, in order
to avoid confrontation, try to ignore-to tolerate-offensive behavior by
our fellow passengers, but we do not thereby persuade ourselves that such
behavior is acceptable.

This is not the meaning of tolerance for many educators today. The
mission of the school, they believe, is to encourage students to be nonjudgmental
about values that differ from their own, and to insist that there are no
right and wrong answers. Tolerance itself becomes the only positive virtue,
and intolerance the only vice. In effect, these educators deny the seriousness
of real conflicts and trivialize the process of taking a stand for what
is right.

The authors of the two books under review have a very different perspective.
Both reject instructional strategies like "Values Clarification"
and related drug education and sex education programs that invite children
to invent their own moral criteria, as well as programs that seek to promote
moral reasoning through discussion of hard cases unlikely ever to arise.
For Kilpatrick, and for Wynne and Ryan, the primary mission of the school
is to initiate youth into the moral heritage of our society and to develop
the habits of virtuous action.

A school, if it is any good, is a little society with its own moral
order, and that moral order is at least as important in carrying out the
school's educational mission as is its formal instruction. A school whose
moral order is that of the subway-pretending not to recognize disagreements-cannot
educate properly. Is the only alternative, then, to celebrate the disagreements
while insisting that they are of no moral consequence? These two books
insist that it is not.

In Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong, William Kilpatrick
discusses more clearly and persuasively than anyone has yet done why both
the content and strategies of current instruction are not only inadequate
but often downright harmful. He writes:

Americans have been led to believe that their children will be able
to fight their personal moral struggles with weapons that, upon examination,
turn out to be very flimsy; there is not much evidence that values curriculums
or the "self-esteem" they claim to foster have much effect on
behavior. It is perhaps for this reason that values educators have shifted
the focus of moral education away from personal behavior toward public
policy issues. What seems to matter for them is not whether one is a good
son or daughter, brother or sister, but whether one has formulated a position
on nuclear weapons, the environment, or surrogate motherhood.

Kilpatrick shows in detail why most of what is done in the name of drug
education and sex education does not serve to develop the habits that sustain
virtuous or even sensible living, and urges that we "reestablish schools
as places of serious moral purpose," something not achieved by abstract
exhortation. He quotes Bruno Bettelheim: "The question for a child
is not 'Do I want to be good?' but 'Whom do I want to be like?'" The
naive notion that moral decisions are made in a void, as though the child
could reinvent the rules that countless generations have learned through
experience, is the basis for too many educational practices. As Stanley
Hauerwas and David Burrell have pointed out, one cannot speak of morality-as-decision-making
while ignoring the fact that decisions are always made in the context of
one's "narrative." Morality removed from narrative, from a sense
of the shape and direction of one's individual life and one's community,
is meaningless.

Kilpatrick urges that moral education be promoted through the use of
stories that provide a sense of what used to be called "the attractiveness
of goodness." He compares the use of a "lifeboat exercise"
used in Values Clarification classes, in which the pupils are to decide
which of the passengers in an overloaded lifeboat should be thrown overboard-"a
young couple and their child, an elderly brother and sister, a doctor,
a bookkeeper, an athlete, an entertainer, and so on"- with the film
A Night to Remember, based upon the Titanic disaster. The film

marshals its audience swiftly and powerfully to the side of certain
values. We feel admiration for the radio operators who stay at their post.
We feel pity and contempt for the handful of male passengers who sneak
into lifeboats. There are not an infinite number of ways to respond to
these scenes. . . . Drama is not the right medium for creating a value-neutral
climate. It exerts too much moral force.

Thus he proposes that parents read stories to their children from books
that promote moral heroism-an extensive annotated list of which Kilpatrick
includes as an appendix.

The emphasis of Wynne and Ryan's book, Reclaiming Our Schools,
is on what schools can do to become communities within which the habits
of virtue are learned. On their first page they reject the idea that what
is needed is simply an improved curriculum: "We believe moral schools
will comfortably devise ways of handling immediate, topical moral issues.
Conversely, schools without sound moral norms may well misapply the most
wholesome problem-oriented instruction."

They stress the importance of everything that happens in a school,
since a "school or classroom devoid of virtuous acts is not transmitting
traditional values, regardless of the refined thoughts that may be passing
through pupils' minds," and they call for school assemblies, ceremonies,
and prizes of various types, as well as ample opportunities for pupils
to take responsibility in the life of the school.

Wynne and Ryan agree with Kilpatrick's disparagement of attempts to
teach moral reasoning before children have internalized the principles
from which reasoning should proceed, arguing that "the first moral
need of the young is to learn to avoid ratiocination. Instead, they must
accept the centrality of doing the hard thing without thinking about it."
Similarly, the teacher must see moral challenge in the daily details of
schoolwork. "Being a moral model is not waiting for the Great Dilemma
to come along. . . . It is giving one's diligent attention to teaching
and to the small demands of our professional life. . . ."

Why should schools seek to develop virtue? After all, many seem to
do a poor enough job simply teaching basic skills and a little history
and geography. Wynne and Ryan argue that moral education is central to
the socializing mission of schools. "All societies want people to
be formally competent, to possess appropriate skills. But the greatest
opprobrium is directed at morally incompetent people. It is bad
to be stupid, but worse to be evil."

It also seems likely that schools will not do a very good job of making
young people smart unless they also devote careful attention to making
them good. "The undisciplined student and the undisciplined classroom,"
Wynne and Ryan write, "are resistant to acquiring knowledge and intellectual
skills." The school that is academically successful is likely to be
marked by purposeful attention to the crafts of teaching and learning,
of reading, writing, and disciplined inquiry. These qualities, as Aristotle
pointed out, are themselves virtues.

But it is not enough to know what should be at the heart of the curriculum,
or even how schools should be organized to develop the habits of civic
and personal virtue, if those schools must function in an environment that
constantly works against their efforts. There is reason to believe that
our educational system makes it very difficult for schools to have the
qualities that would make them effective.

A small example: Kilpatrick notes that when the federal Adolescent
Family Life Act of 1981 provided federal funds for the development of sex
education curricula based upon the encouragement of abstinence, the American
Civil Liberties Union filed suit on the grounds that this constituted an
establishment of religion. This argument was rejected by the Supreme Court,
which found that teaching teenagers the value of chastity was a "reasonable
secular goal." According to a recent (March 24, 1993) article in Education
Week, however, it appears likely that funding for abstinence-oriented
sex education, currently $7.5 million contrasted with $173 million for
contraception-oriented programs, will be eliminated by Congress. The responsible
official in the new Administration was quoted as saying that "just
because one particular group supports abstinence doesn't mean that should
be our only focus."

It might seem to follow that different schools should be encouraged
and supported in using different approaches, reflecting the agreement of
the parents and teachers directly concerned, and that parents should be
allowed to select publicly funded schools corresponding to their own views
about what is in the best interests of their children. This is unfortunately
not the prevailing view among those who make policy for education about
what is desirable and consistent with the demands of a democratic system
for a pluralistic society. Instead they stubbornly insist that schools
should regard the concerns of parents as attempts at "censorship,"
while providing little support for the development of sharply profiled
schools where teachers can teach and give leadership with confidence that
parents in fact will support them.

Wynne and Ryan take us step by step, with admirable clarity, through
what is necessary to create good schools, but it will require a fundamental
change in the policy climate dominating American public education before
such schools become the norm rather than the rare exception.

Charles L. Glenn is Professor of Educational
Policy at Boston University. Joshua Glenn teaches in an inner-city middle
school in Boston.